WASHINGTON — You hear a perfect record cited over and over in the debt limit debate: The United States has never defaulted. Better put an asterisk by that. America has briefly stiffed some of its creditors on at least two occasions.

Once, the young nation had a dramatic excuse: The Treasury was empty, the White House and Capitol were charred ruins, and even the troops fighting the War of 1812 weren’t getting paid.

A second time, in 1979, was a back-office glitch that ended up costing taxpayers billions of dollars. The Treasury Department blamed the mishap on a crush of paperwork partly caused by lawmakers who — this will sound familiar — bickered too long before raising the nation’s debt limit.

In 1979, lawmakers relented the day before Social Security checks were expected to start bouncing. The tumult contributed to Treasury’s failure to redeem $122 million in maturing T-bills. T-bill interest ticked up 0.6 percent, a lasting bump that added about $12 billion to the cost of paying the national debt, according to a 1989 study in The Financial Review journal.

A customer dining at Washington’s Oceanaire restaurant noticed an unusual line at the bottom of his receipt: “Due to the rising costs of doing business in this location, including costs associated with higher minimum wage rates, a 3% surcharge has been added to your total bill.”

Three fundraising giants decided to pull events from President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida, on Thursday, signaling a direct blowback to his business empire from his comments on Charlottesville’s racial unrest.